I'll be requesting and offering FK, HL, BSG'78 and YB for sure. I may or may not add others — I'm not comfortable in fandoms that haven't been canceled yet :-) — but will certainly read many others when the time comes.

FK's final count was 19 nominated characters, and HL's 11 — nothing to sneeze at! but there was overlap that we could have leveraged into even more character nominations. Oh, well. (Amanda is still showing on HL's nominations list, but I believe that she's too frequently written to be eligible. I presume system lag is the culprit.)

Very interestingly, following a disagreement about the eligibility of Xavin from Marvel's Runaways — a character retconned by Mr. Whedon as identifying as female, and thus eligible for the fest as female and nominated fairly; but that retconning is much hated by other fans — the mods determined a significant change in eligibility going forward. From now on, the fest will be, not for all rare characters who personally choose to identify as female, but for any rare characters who do not identify as male. (For example, PoI's Machine, AtS's Illyria and The Vorkosigan Saga's Bel are all now eligible, as well as the earlier interpretation of Xavin.) I'm not certain how I will feel about that when I've finished reflecting on it. Right now, with the news fresh, I'm a little wary. I apologize if this is privileged of me. I tend to be quite literal. The flip from an opt-in definition to an opt-out one grabs my attention.

>"In fact, identifying women as "not-men" is part of the problem, isn't it?"

That's a very pithy way of expressing a major concern about this well-intentioned change.

According to the conversation on the post announcing the change, the mods are considering changing the name of the the fest to encompass this changed aim, perhaps to something about "other" rather than "women."

I'm not sure that I would have enthusiasm for a celebration of "otherness" or "notness," defined negatively against a male norm, rather than positively in the characters' lives. At best, this change creates a marketing obstacle. At worst, we're losing a formerly great event.